By Helen Brown
Anyone who has passed the Google Fundamentals exam will be aware that this is more of a general exam testing a broad range of knowledge on account management………….. not that I am implying for a second that you do not need to learn for it, as this is far from the truth!
Preparation is necessary! whether sitting one of the Google exams for the first time, or whether you have many years of AdWords account management experience under your belt and you are resitting to keep your certification up to date. But once again, the point I am trying to make is that IN MY OPINION I found it to be more general than the Search exam or the Display exam, and not as challenging.
I passed my Fundamentals exam 6 months ago and my Search exam 3 months ago (phew! I thought that Search was a tough one!) More recently I have passed my Google Display marketing advanced exam, I thought I would share my experience with you…………………………..
Once again, I found myself studying for this exam at the Google learning Centre. I thought to myself, “I’ll have this licked in no time at all, it’s just two sections! No problem!”. When I started reading it, it contained many links to different sections of the learning centre, and YouTube information too. At a first glance it doesn’t look like there is very much to learn at all but this was not an accurate opinion that I had hastily formed!
There are a lot of specification sheets, different ad formats and different settings to learn about. My head was spinning, I felt a little intimidated by all of this, I started to wonder, how am I going to remember it all?
BUT!
If you take anything with you after reading this blog post, then take this-
Don’t allow yourself to get in a pickle about the specifications etc, I really panicked and it was completely unnecessary!
Of course, I found myself making notes on the different ad sizes, file sizes and formats, if you are clever enough to commit all of this to memory then that is fantastic, I certainly didn’t manage to do this but in all honesty, I can’t imagine that Google expect you to?
Another extremely valuable learning source that I thoroughly used whilst preparing for my exam was the webinar. As I’m sure there are many of us who regularly read the Google blog, you will know that they offer webinars in different areas of account management which are so helpful in teaching new ideas and techniques in many areas of an AdWords account. I find them extremely useful, I do know how to manage my Google account but another perspective on account management is always good, I find I always learn something new when I attend a webinar.
I began to build confidence through testing my newly acquired knowledge with the practice resource provided by ipassexam.com, so valuable to me in my learning process!
I decided to take the exam. I must admit I did find this one a little tricky too. I had two hours to complete the exam and there were 110 questions. I chose to skip a few of the questions and go back to them at the end. I read the questions thoroughly, marked what I thought was the best option and moved on. I did not finish this exam very quickly, I found that I really needed the allotted time to thoroughly read and understand the questions. Some of the questions were really quite long and detailed, at the end of the question answering I only had 7 minutes left!
I clicked to submit my answers for marking, completed the short questionnaire on my exam experience, It only takes a few minutes and it’s always good to give a little feedback.
Time to get my result…..I had passed!……90%………….a huge sigh of relief!
